For Liqueur, Fashionable Approach to Reach Women

A NEW print advertisement featuring Eva Longoria, the model and actress who stars in “Desperate Housewives,” initially appears to be for an upscale perfume.

Under the words “Be glamorous,” Ms. Longoria, as captured by fashion photographer Randall Slavin, wears a shimmering pink dress, her chestnut hair cascading over one shoulder. A tear-shaped bottle of pink liquid rests on a table in the foreground, as if Ms. Longoria might at any moment reach for it and spritz her flawless neck.

But while perfumes often promise to be intoxicating, what is in this bottle truly is: it is Nuvo, a brand of sparkling liqueur that blends French vodka, white wine and fruit nectar.

The new campaign, by the Levinson Tractenberg Group in Manhattan, will introduce six ads featuring Ms. Longoria, primarily in women’s fashion magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Elle and Marie Claire. The ads aim to appeal to women ages 25 to 40, said Joel Tractenberg, a partner in the agency.

The Nuvo Web site calls it “the ultimate accessory,” and Mr. Tractenberg said the ads reinforce that by “taking cues visually from the beauty and fashion world.”

Typically designed to appeal to men, liquor ads traditionally have featured attractive women, but more as trophies.

“So much liquor advertising is testosterone-driven or macho or overtly sexual, but it was important to us to create ads that were sexy but not sexist, and that women could look to and admire,” Mr. Tractenberg said. “Eva Longoria is a beautiful woman, and sexy — but we didn’t feature her on a bed with a come-hither look.”

This is the first national campaign for Nuvo, and with marketing and public relations efforts featuring Ms. Longoria throughout 2011, will cost as much as $5 million, the brand said.

Nuvo is the brainchild of Raphael Yakoby, who in 2001, while in his mid-20s, introduced Hpnotiq, a blue blend of liqueur and juices, which he sold two years later to Heaven Hill Distilleries of Bardstown, Ky., for $60 million.

Mr. Yakoby then had two formative insights: the first was that while cocktails like cosmopolitans and apple martinis were popular with women, liquor brand marketing was geared nearly exclusively to men; and the second was that women were drawn to luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, Prada and Chanel.

“So I was thinking that the female consumer was one of the biggest consumers of these luxury goods brands, and really, as far as the liquor industry was concerned, there was nothing that represented that cachet,” said Mr. Yakoby, 36.

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Nuvo, a pink sparkling liqueur with fruit nectar that is aimed at women, has gained a following among African-American and Hispanic men.

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Women who drink alcohol prefer fruitier concoctions, with 52 percent mixing fruit juice with spirits (compared with 44 percent of men) and 62 percent liking fruit-infused spirits like Absolut Raspberri (compared with 48 percent of men), according to Mintel, a market research company.

“Women tend to have a little more of a sweeter palate, a little more of a fruitier palate, and they want to taste the alcohol, but they don’t want it to be as powerful as a bourbon or a straight vodka,” Mr. Yakoby said.

Sweetened, though not cloyingly so, with fruit nectar (the brand guards the exact fruit blend) and at 30 proof, Nuvo has an alcohol content higher than beer and wine but lower than hard liquor. A 750-milliliter bottle, the size of a standard bottle of wine, retails for about $30.

While the bottle itself borrowed design elements from perfume bottles, the cap, which is beveled, is meant to resemble the tip of a tube of lipstick, and, lest there be any doubt about for whom Nuvo was intended, when it was introduced in 2007, the bottle said “for her” and the brand’s Web site was NuvoForHer.com

And then, Nuvo became popular with men.

African-Americans of both sexes who drink liquor are more likely on average to like alcohol mixed with juice, with 54 percent stating such a preference compared with 47 percent of imbibers over all, according to Mintel. Hispanic liquor drinkers, meanwhile, have a predilection for fruit-infused alcohol, with 60 percent liking it, compared with the average of 50 percent.

When it became evident that Nuvo was becoming popular among African-American and Hispanic men, the brand removed “for her” from the bottle and changed its Web address to SparklingNuvo.com. Also, through product placement deals, Nuvo appeared in hip-hop videos by musicians including Ludacris and Jamie Foxx, and in Latin music videos by musicians including Jenni Rivera and A. B. Quintanilla’s All Starz.

Today, while women buy 70 percent to 80 percent of Nuvo, when it comes to actual consumption, it is slightly more popular with men, who account for 52 percent of Nuvo drinkers. (Drinking a pink beverage may require a thick skin, though, as evidenced in July in San Antonio, when, as reported in The San Antonio Express-News, a man mocked for drinking Nuvo at a party drew a pistol and shot another man in the abdomen.)

The brand estimates it will sell about 2.9 million bottles in 2010. Diageo, whose brands include Johnnie Walker, Guinness and Smirnoff, made an initial minority investment in Nuvo in 2007, and in June increased that investment, and now owns about a 70 percent stake of the brand.

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While Nuvo welcomes men, the new print campaign is aimed squarely at women.

“We got a reading on how the male audience was accepting the brand, but now we have to make every effort to make sure our core market grows, and the female consumer is our core demographic,” the Nuvo founder, Mr. Yakoby, said.

But the “Be glamorous” slogan of the initial ad and the characterization of the liqueur as an accessory for women on the Nuvo Web site drew criticism from Michele Simon, research and policy director at the Marin Institute, an alcohol industry watchdog.

“This company makes an association with glamour and says a potentially harmful alcoholic beverage is the equivalent of a fashion accessory, and that drinking this product is somehow not just as harmless as putting on bracelets but also is essential,” Ms. Simon said. “I think that’s a harmful message.”

Mr. Yakoby countered, “We are all about responsible drinking first and foremost.” He added, “Our point is not drink a lot to be glamorous — it’s drink responsibly and in moderation and just be glamorous over all.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 27, 2010, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: For Liqueur, Fashionable Approach to Reach Women. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe